Forty years ago today, George Lucas' Star Wars premiered at Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. It ushered in a culture of film and accompanying merchandising the world had never before seen, culminating in a $6 billion dollar purchase of Lucasfilm and its intellectual property in 2012 by Disney.

Star Wars was really the beginning of the mainstreaming or dumbing down of Science Fiction.

May of 1977 was an interesting time in history especially if you examine it from the perspective of the technology industry and from a sociological standpoint.

Star Wars came out before the PC Revolution. Apple didn't have a personal computer product in the market until a month before the film's release and there were no Intel PCs until IBM released one in 1981.

Politically, we were in the Carter Administration, the "Empire" and our enemy was the Soviet Union. We were in a recession. There was an oil embargo and people were lining up for hours to buy gasoline. We were two years out from the end of Vietnam.

This was the backdrop against which moviegoers were trying to escape in air conditioned comfort for two hours for what would be a very hot summer.

I saw the film opening week when I was eight years old. I had the toys, the lunch boxes, the pajamas, the playsets.

As I look back it as an adult, Star Wars was really the beginning of the mainstreaming or dumbing down of Science Fiction. And while I enjoy the films, I don't have the same fondness for them as I do other popular sci-fi franchises, such as Star Trek.

Alas, Star Trek was intelligent and innovative but it would not really come into its own until it entered syndication post-cancellation and the films and The Next Generation which came much later. It was Star Wars' commercial film success that enabled Star Trek to return and be successful.

Star Wars legitimized sci-fi for everyone else. You didn't have to be a total bookworm or social justice warrior to appreciate it. Star Trek had cool gadgets and deep character interaction, but Star Wars had a sweeping story arc and swashbuckling.

In many ways, decades later, they continue to be the Yin and Yang of popular SF mythos.

At first glance, it's the weaponry. The planet-killing Death Star is undoubtedly the ultimate representation of a weapon of mass destruction and an accurate reflection of people's greatest fears at the time.

We were so close to the brink of annihilation in that past decade that so few of the successive generations will appreciate the state of constant fear all of us lived under on a daily basis. It should come as no surprise that the media collectively latched onto this a few years later by referring to our military R&D effort into shooting down enemy ICBM's using fantastical energy weapons as "Star Wars".

While the energy weapons are flashy, ultimately, however, I think Star Wars' technological legacy comes down to the droids. It is the fundamental, albeit lofty idea that robots can be friends, not hell-bent on destroying humanity like HAL from 2001:A Space Odyssey or scary B-movie stuff like Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Everyone who walked out of that film in the summer of 1977 wanted to own a droid. I think the big question is are we any closer to getting one now than we were 40 years ago?

There's no question that robotics and artificial intelligence has gotten way, way more sophisticated in the last 40 years. But we don't yet have general-purpose robots like Artoo and Threepio. And I don't think we're going to get them anytime soon.

Amazon, the world's largest retailer, uses robots extensively in its shipping centers to prep orders for its millions of customers every day. Automated machine tooling via Computerized Numerical Control, referred to as CNC, is also widespread throughout the entire manufacturing industry.

And of course, 3D printing in the commercial, industrial and consumer sectors is growing like wildfire.

Autonomous-capable vehicles, such as Tesla's luxury electric vehicles and Google's fleet of mapping cars are becoming more commonplace. It will be only a few years before there are purist autonomous designs used in commercial transportation and less than a decade before we see it used in consumer transportation at a wide scale.

Robots are still very much in the vanguard of space exploration and they have brought us to the farthest reaches of our solar system and on the surface of Mars. They will continue to be the biggest bang for the buck in this area as they are far more cost-effective and safer than sending people.

Robots are also used extensively in telemedicine, where skilled doctors can be thousands of miles away from a patient they are performing surgery on.

Robots can't give you food poisoning in your burger due to bad hygiene and due to their repetitive and precise nature, will always make that latte perfectly.

All of these robots, however, are crafted for a specific purpose and use case. They aren't walking around and interacting with us on a daily basis and offering us advice on whether or not to fly through an asteroid field.

These aren't meant to be our friends or our colleagues. These are meant to be our slaves. As they should be. But the reality is, we've become slaves to them as much they have become slaves to us.

We've now conditioned ourselves to take our robot intelligence with us at all times and put it all over our homes. Our smartphones can run highly sophisticated agents that with only the sound of our voice can find the best local pizza restaurant, tell us the upcoming weather, or the latest sports scores.

Many of us now have installed intelligent listening devices -- such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home -- that we've put in our living rooms and sleeping quarters that will not only do all of the above but will also control our appliances and play us our desired music at our command.

All of this powered by extreme heavy lifting done by shared compute resources in the cloud.

So it would seem that our desires to be filled with constant content and information and for the cloud to cater to our every whim is fueling the development of Skynet, Colossus, and HAL rather than Artoo and Threepio.

As an eight-year-old, I desperately wanted my very own Artoo and a Threepio. Forty years later, I hope we figure out how to keep our jobs away from them, that they don't acquire too much information on us as individuals, and that ultimately they won't destroy us.

Are we heading towards Artoo and Threepio, or Gort, HAL and The Terminator? Talk Back and Let Me Know.